Yup. The end of a way of life. Too bad. It’s a good way. Wagons forward! Yo!

……John Wayne

Rugged but at the same time elegant, you will love the look and feel of this sofa table. Adjectives that will pop into your mind as you look at and run your hand across this rustic table include natural,earthy, solid, lasting, heirloom, tradition, and honest. When you think of “cooking from scratch” you automatically think of delicious food that is not just dumped out of a can or reconstituted with water and served. You think of food that is prepared the way your grandmother used to do it, with tender loving care, knowing that the people she loved the most would be sitting down together and enjoying a hearty repast together. Well, we make this table and our other custom furniture with the same approach.

The city dweller would say we are vertically integrated…. We just say we made your table from the tree that used to stand right there.

We start with all natural ingredients straight from the forest. We have an abundance of people in our area that make their living from wood. Our part of the Missouri Ozarks is blessed with wonderful forests with an abundance of hardwoods, and the loggers that make their livelihood in those woods know their trees. They also know what we want in a log to make our rustic furniture. When they bring us the right red oak log, we go to work with the same “Cookin From Scratch” approach and tender loving care that Grandma did. We start by custom cut the log using our old fashioned circular sawmill (the kind you might remember seeing in cartoons as a kid).

We Kiln Dry the Wood Right in Our Shop

Once we get the raw materials cut to the right dimensions, the red oak goes into one of our five (yes 5) kilns that we maintain right in our shop in the Missouri Ozarks. The wood is kiln dried to a moisture content of 6-8 %. Wood dried in this manner not only can be worked better but it produces a piece of rustic furniture that will last. Wood that is not dried can change, including warping, contracting or splitting, if it has to dry after it is already made into a piece of furniture. Up to this point, our custom furniture builders have overseen this process to assure that their “ingredients” are like Goldilocks said “Just Right”! The wood is then worked into the sofa table you see here, while preserving much of the character of the proud tree that stood in the forest for years. The finish can be varied to suit your preferences. The one in these photos is somewhat darker, but some prefer a lighter color, which can be easily done, if you let us know what you prefer and the look you want. Also available with the end tables shown in one of these photos, and by the way, we make a bedroom set in the same style.